Germany awakes to a problem that started years ago / Immigrants were needed to rebuild after World War II

Ruth Ciesinger, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, August 20, 2006

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a news conference after a meeting in Berlin August 17, 2006. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz (GERMANY) 0

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a news conference after a meeting in Berlin August 17, 2006. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz (GERMANY) 0

Photo: TOBIAS SCHWARZ

Photo: TOBIAS SCHWARZ

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a news conference after a meeting in Berlin August 17, 2006. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz (GERMANY) 0

German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a news conference after a meeting in Berlin August 17, 2006. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz (GERMANY) 0

Photo: TOBIAS SCHWARZ

Germany awakes to a problem that started years ago / Immigrants were needed to rebuild after World War II

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It took the shock of a dead Turkish woman, shot three times in the face by her brother, and a school in Berlin, where teachers had completely lost control over their mostly Arabic and Turkish students and asked the city to close down the place.

Only then did the debate about immigration fully reach the German public. In July, Chancellor Angela Merkel held the first so-called Integration Summit, where politicians and immigrants talked about their common interest in cooperation. One day later, the Federal Minister of the Interior leaked its review of Germany's immigration law. It mainly asked for stricter sanctions.

While the U.S. debate over how to deal with millions of people living and working illegally in this country includes a guest worker program, Germany has to deal with problems created by a guest worker program that began more than 50 years ago. Itended 30 years ago but still has radical effects on German society. This is also true in many other European countries, which immigrant workers helped rebuild after World War II.

The blooming West German economy in the '50s and '60s needed a lot more hard-working men than were around or willing to do the dirty jobs. So in a search for more blue collar employees, the government signed treaties with several countries, and over the years hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards and, especially, Turks poured into West Germany.

In car factories, steel mills and coal mines, they laid the cornerstone of the German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). But that didn't mean they would participate in it. The guest workers were expected to work and to pay their share to the social welfare system, but never to stay.

It turned out differently.

"We called for workers, but there came people", the Swiss novelist Max Frisch said. So even if they had no chance to gain German citizenship, more than 50 percent of the guest workers never returned to their home countries, and after a few years, they sent for their families.

For decades, one German government after another ignored the fact that immigrants were a growing part of the population. Still in the '90s, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl dismissed the notion that immigration played much of a role in German society -- an amazing assertion because at that time almost 1 in 10 people living in Germany were immigrants without a German passport.

For many years, there was no expectation that these Turks or Italians would rise from dishwasher to millionaire. They might have been given some social benefits, but even that became controversial as unemployment rose.

Only recently has some of this changed.

In 1998, a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens came to power, and the two parties, especially the Greens, pushed for a new immigration law. The first plans were ambitious. Dual citizenship was discussed, as well as more liberal laws for refugees. But the conservative opposition instantly realized the populist potential and stirred up fear of thousands of people with dark skin and different culture flooding the country -- and succeeded instantly by winning a major regional election.

The debate turned into a political drama when the government passed the law, but the German supreme court overturned it. It was 2005 when the law finally was put into place, but during that time unemployment had risen significantly and measures that would have eased immigration for highly qualified workers had been mostly dismissed.

What remained of the law provided easier access to language courses or similar tools of assimilation, and further smoothed the citizenship path for immigrants already living in Berlin, Hamburg or Munich. But the damage of decades of negligence would also take years to overcome.

"The problem is not a question of different lifestyles or different habits," said Faruk Sen, director of the Center for Turkey Studies at the University of Essen. "The problem is a question of equality of opportunities."

Some groups of immigrants -- Iranian refugees, for instance -- have melted into the society. Most have college degrees and send a bigger percentage of their children to universities than native Germans do.

In contrast, the first guest workers were hard-working and healthy, but not rocket scientists. They had little time and even less opportunity to learn German or even think of helping their children at school. But in Germany, the success of a child depends very much on family. Now the grandchildren of the original guest workers often speak even less German than their parents do. The kids end up in schools like the one in Berlin where teachers are happy if the students turn up at all.

At the time teachers started to plead for the Ruetli school's closure, more than 80 percent of the students had what is called a migratory background, but all the teachers were German. The the frustrating knowledge that there is no chance of an apprenticeship with a degree from a school like this and the daily clash of cultures boost violence and aggression. Teaching becomes almost impossible and the vicious circle keeps turning.

As a consequence, the unemployment rate has surged: In Berlin, 40 percent of the 440,000 Turks do not have a permanent job; nationwide, their unemployment rate is 32 percent. While Italian immigrants face similar difficulties, young Turkish and Arabic men also face another hurdle: fear of radical Islam.

There has not been a terrorist attack in Germany like the ones in Madrid or London. But since Sept. 11, young Muslim men became the focus of suspicion, and horrible acts such as honor killings contribute to the image of a gruesome Islam. After a Turkish teenagermurdered his sister in an especially brutal way, a lot of politicians wanted to expel the whole family.

What gets lost in this debate is that almost 20 percent of the people living in Germany either have a parent who is not of German origin or do not posses a German passport. Most of them are well integrated.

Now the number of immigrants is declining, along with the population in general, and Germany will need all its immigrants when the economy heats up again. But nobody has a brainstorm about how to make the country more attractive to future immigrants.